Amen.

Tony, I don’t agree with you. All the people I worked with, including contributors to Django, Zend, Symfony, PureMVC and Grails are very intelligent and talented people.

Guys, I’m sure there are plenty of forums where you can post your rants. In my opinion, they are very unproductive and don’t bring anything interesting to the table.

The Forge technology stack is a better than the situation that currently exists, and there are great benefits in adopting ZF if your eco system consists of a mix of hand-cranked pages, XSLT, SSIs etc, stitched together with Perl and C voodoo.

But I’m also of the opinion that ZF is something akin to a solution in search of a problem. Or worse so desperate at having the flexibility to meet the needs of as many developers as possible that it’s a jack of all trades and master of none.

And apologies for again having to point out the naive notion that just having unit tests is a good enough solution in a modern application framework.

I haven’t been an active member of the PHP community for a number of years but my initial reactions on returning are that it hasn’t evolved much in the time I’ve been away. I think there are plenty of great ideas from Python/Django, Ruby/Rails, Smalltalk/Seaside and others it could adopt but seems reticent to do so.

Tony

Sysadmins that use Perl instead of Bash, Python instead of Perl. Web developers that use Ruby instead of PHP, or PHP instead of Python. Software Engineers that use Java instead of C#, or C# instead of C++. Flash or Silverlight? iPhone or Android? Mac or Linux? Debian or Red Hat? GNOME or KDE? Apple or Microsoft? Gosling or Hejlsberg? Wall or Van Rossum? Ritchie or Stroustrup? Vi or Emac? ActiveRecord or DataMapper? Gateway or Repository?

Life is too short to argue over something that nobody can be right about.

If you think units tests are the be all and end all of testing you are expressing an immature testing philosophy.

Screencasts and conference presentations turn beinners into journeymen. The lack thereof in the PHP community possibly explains the predominance of script kiddies.

Quantity != Quality.
Glad you agree though that sysadmins see Python as a more mature language.

Tony

Sorry, I didn’t catch your name. Have you ever written a unit test or contributed to an open source project before?

Zend: http://tinyurl.com/mjwazd
Django: http://tinyurl.com/m38m3o

You are more than welcome to join us.

– Rails has many more screencasts

Screencasts? We are programmers, not designers ;)

– A social observer might comment that the most talented ones have moved on to Python or Ruby

Here are some interesting facts:

.. Linux owns over 75% of the server market, and Linux Engineers preferred scripting language is now Python.
.. According to the TIOBE Index, PHP is still the most popular dynamic language.
.. Java and C are the most popular compiled languages.
.. Visual Basic is still more popular than Ruby.
.. Groovy and Grails is better for Java developers.

Don’t forget that languages come and go, the secret is not to allow your time to be cluttered up by things that don’t make a difference, like arguing about a scripting language or a framework.

I think BBC made an excellent choice by choosing LAMP (Perl, Python, PHP) and Java, instead of Ruby. But that’s just my opinion, of course.

If you feel so strong about this, ask the sys admins at the BBC to port all their perl and python scripts to ruby :)

Zend Framework’s extensive unit tests

The PHP community appears to have a very naive notion of what constitutes a mature testing environment.
If you look at the discussions that has been going on in the Django and Rails communities you’ll a rich dialogue on Test Driven Development, Behaviour Driven Development, regression testing, integration testing, mocking and stubbing, brittleness of tests, fuzzers, exposing code complexity etc

The high-quality implementation of the MVC web application architecture provides a foundation for all Zend Framework applications.

A dubious claim IMHO. Zend is certainly feature-rich but that does not necessarily equate with being ‘high-quality’. The code I’ve been exposed too shows fails to show a proper separation of concerns, numerous anti-patterns all stemming from the decision not to encourage or enforce good application design

Documentation.
Zend Framework tools (Wiki, Issue Tracker, VCS, Mailing List, etc).

Django’s documentation is vastly superior and Rails has many more screencasts and video tutorials than all the PHP frameworks put together.

A vast community of talented developers

A social observer might comment that the most talented ones have moved on to Python or Ruby. At the last Google Hack Day in London, Ruby was the language of choice amoungst the developers there (67% is the number I recall)